Pirate Bay "Borrows" CPU to Mine Virtual Currency

Monday, 18 September 2017 05:47
Written by Benjamin "Zeus" Heide

Although Bitcoin fell a bit (almost half-price) last week, that's not stopping the Pirate Bay from getting into it on a bit of a shady side of things. There is a nice malicious piece of code floating around over at the site that hijacks your CPU to crunch cryptocurrency for the Bay. I guess they probably just need it for their legal defense now that they are under heavy attack. This is not good that browsers and systems can be exploited through ads and such. Be careful where you search - and remember - nothing, absolutely nothing is free. There's always a price to pay.

The site tells TorrentFreak that it was testing the feature for about 24 hours as a new way of generating revenue, and that it could eventually be enough to replace ads. In short, don't be surprised if this becomes a mainstay of the site going forward. Users have found that they can block the miner through their browser settings or add-ons like ad blockers, so it's not inescapable.